So, what does a freshman do after membership on a football team that went 3-7 and was used as punching bags for the entire season? Go out for basketball, of course. Small schools like Madisonville usually had some combination of athletes that played two or all three of the sports offered. I tried out for and made the B-team in the 1969-1970 season. It was a great experience. Many of the guys from the 1969 junior high team also made the roster, along with a couple of others who had not played, and the rest were sophomores who landed there for a variety of reasons. I believe everyone tried out for the main varsity team, and we were the 12 (later to be known as The Dirty Dozen) who were sent down to play the other cast-offs of other programs.
What The Dirty Dozen lacked in finesse, we made up for in assholism. We were rough and mean and not likely to be pushed around. That we didn’t win a lot of games didn’t seem to matter to any of us. We always played hard, though not as dirty as the nickname implied. The lot of us were experienced cussers, and we cussed nearly all the time, even in minor flaps, or for no particular reason. Several of my best friends were members, three of whom were former band mates and another was a future one, and we liked playing on that team.
The varsity started out slowly, too, losing three games by the first week of December, in one case losing to a much weaker opponent. But I had great hopes for that team. It had great size, depth, and an experienced backcourt, including a crafty and skillful point guard. The lead guitarist of The Heroes had finally become the starting center for the team. At 6’5”, he, too, was a highly skilled ball handler, and he had mastered classic pivoting and footwork. He also had a deadly weak side corner jumper. Like the team, he started slowly early on, but when he heated up I wondered why he hadn’t played much the year before. The previous team had a frontcourt of senior starters, all fairly tall, big guys. The starting center had been the starting center on the football team. The star of the show was a 6’5” fellow who played close to the basket. He had very good court sense and had an accurate mid-range jump shot. Some of his points came on tip-in of misses. The poor guy did occasionally disappear in some games; however, the new center always showed up.
A game was scheduled for the evening of the last day of classes leading into Christmas break. Though the B team didn’t have a game, I went to support The Tornadoes. The usual game crowd was mightily thinned that night. I sat in the stands with my coach where we commented often on various technical aspects of the playing during the game, which was a Tornado victory. I spoke to the principal on my way out, and left a nice feeling. The next week, on Christmas day, snow started falling a little before 11 a.m., and didn’t stop until a blanket of six or seven inches covered nearly everything. A little after midnight the gymnasiums at Madisonville High School and Tellico Plains High School (near duplicate designs, and build by the same company) collapsed under the weight of snow. A hard freeze gripped the land for a few days and I wondered what was going to happen.
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